US District Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled in 2024 that Google unlawfully maintained monopolies in general search services and general search text advertising, dismissed antitrust lawsuits brought by Chegg and Penske Media on 30 September 2026 in Washington, DC.
The companies accused Google of using its dominance in search to obtain their content for AI-powered answers without compensation. Mehta found that their amended complaints did not plausibly establish the antitrust violations they alleged.
The ruling gives Google a legal victory in a dispute over how AI Overviews are changing the economics of web search. It also draws a narrower legal line: Mehta's earlier finding that Google holds monopoly power did not, by itself, establish that the conduct challenged by Chegg and Penske violated antitrust law.
Publishers Said Google Broke the Web's Old Bargain
Chegg and Penske Media, whose brands include Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard, argued that Google had disrupted the long-standing exchange behind web search.
Publishers allow Google to crawl and index their pages. Search engines, in turn, have historically directed users to outside websites through links in search results.
AI Overviews complicate that relationship.
Google can place an AI-generated summary at the top of a search results page, potentially answering a query before a user visits the original source.
Chegg and Penske alleged that Google used publisher content to support those answers while reducing traffic and revenue to the websites that produced the material.
Mehta rejected a central part of their reciprocal-dealing theory.
The publishers had alleged an expectation that Google would send them search traffic if they made their content available, but the judge wrote that 'an expectation is not an agreement'.
That distinction mattered because the claims required more than an informal understanding of how web search had historically worked.
Why Google's Monopoly Finding Wasn't Enough
Mehta is already a central figure in Google's broader antitrust battle. On 5 August 2024, he ruled that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by unlawfully maintaining monopolies in general search services and general search text advertising through exclusionary conduct.
The Chegg and Penske cases raised different legal questions.
Penske argued, among other things, that Google Search and AI Overviews should be treated as separate products for a tying claim. Mehta rejected that theory, finding that the complaint did not plausibly establish separate consumer demand for the two. The court instead viewed AI Overviews as part of an integrated search experience.
Other federal claims failed for different reasons.
The court found that the publishers had not adequately established antitrust standing for their monopoly-maintenance claims. It also found that they had not plausibly defined the publishing markets underlying other monopolisation theories.
After dismissing the federal claims, Mehta declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the remaining California unjust enrichment claims. Those state-law claims were therefore dismissed without the court deciding their merits. A final, appealable order accompanied the decision.
Google has denied wrongdoing and argued that it has no obligation to index publishers' content on terms preferred by the publishers.
Judge Acknowledges Publishers' AI Problem
The ruling did not conclude that AI Overviews cause no harm to publishers.
Mehta said the court was not unsympathetic to publishers, journalists, educators and other online creators whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation. His conclusion was narrower: the antitrust claims before him were legally insufficient.
Pew Research Center data provides context for publishers' concerns. In an analysis of browsing activity from 900 US adults in March 2025, users clicked a traditional Google search result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% of visits without one.
Users clicked a source link inside an AI summary on just 1% of visits where a summary appeared.
The figures do not establish how every Google user behaves or prove that AI summaries caused the lower click rate. They do, however, show substantially lower outbound clicking on search pages where AI summaries appeared, an important issue for publishers that rely on search referrals.
Google Is Testing Payments to Some Publishers
The ruling comes as Google experiments with a different relationship with content producers.
The Verge, citing The Information and earlier reporting from Digiday, reported on 30 September that Google is running a pilot programme involving roughly 100 digital publishers. Participants are reportedly paid according to how much their content contributes to AI-generated responses across AI Overviews, AI Mode in Search and the Gemini chatbot.
Reported payments vary widely, while the initiative remains an early-stage pilot rather than an industry-wide compensation model.
The contrast is significant.
Google has defeated Chegg and Penske's attempt to establish liability under these antitrust theories while separately testing payments to some publishers whose material contributes to its AI products.
The pilot does not show that the lawsuits were legally justified, and Mehta's ruling does not decide broader copyright questions surrounding AI training or content reuse.
For publishers, the unresolved issue is no longer simply whether Google has enormous influence over online discovery.
Mehta answered the monopoly question in a different case. The harder question is what legal obligations, if any, follow as search increasingly shifts from directing users towards information to supplying answers itself.
